The GoDown

Friday, October 5

I might’ve just spent the best hour I’ve had so far in Kenya squished into the back of a Jeep with seven other people I just met stuck in Friday afternoon Nairobi traffic. We talked about all kinds of music, the elections, poetry, songwriting, recorded some stuff for a radio talk show and exchanged some phone numbers. Let me backtrack. I just got back from seeing where my ICRP internship for the next few months is going to be and I think it just may be the hottest internship I could possibly get. I am so excited!!

Part of our program here is doing an Integrative Cultural Research Project (ICRP) where we find some kind of local internship or develop a project for the purpose of integrating us more with the locals, improving language use, appreciating the cultural values, etc. We worked with our University of Nairobi program directors to find places we were interested in doing an internship. So I’ll be working at the GoDown Arts Center in the Industrial Area of Nairobi. It was started in 2003 for all different kinds of art and we just went down there today to check it out and sort of get a feel for what we’d specifically like to do there. They’ve never had interns before, but I think that’s going to be a really good thing because it opens it up a lot for us and, looking at the wide variety of stuff they have going on down there, I have lots of options. They’ve got a variety of dance and acrobatic troupes, a TV station, a radio talk show, music recording studios, galleries, and about 30 studios for local and international artists. There are various organizations having to do with the arts that house their offices and studios there, so I can affiliate myself with any one of them. (See www.thegodownartscentre.com, I haven’t looked at the website yet) I told them that I’m interested in doing some kind of community based art work if they have anything like that going on, so next week they’re setting me up to talk to some of the people doing work like that. One of the guys works doing art workshops in slums like Kibera and another is a dance troupe that takes kids out of the slums and teaches them how to dance. There were some other people too that I’m going to talk to. Mainly, I’m just so excited to be able to hang out down there all the time and see what all is going down at the GoDown (teehee) and in the art world of Nairobi which seems like it’s really been emerging within the last few years (everything in Nairobi has really flourished in the past few years, since 2002 when President Moi was finally gone)